It's January 23rd, 1924, early morning. We're in Gorky, a few miles south of the Moscow

city limits. Snow carpets the ground, the wind blows with a bitter chill, but that hasn't

put off the thousands of gathered here. They stand, somber and respectful, lining the

route from Vladimir Lenin's dasha through the woods to the local railway station. Four

men hoist a crimson draped coffin onto their shoulders. Inside it, the father of the

new Russia is dressed in a dark brown suit and a black tie. His hands rest on his chest,

one relaxed, the other clenched in a fist, pugnacious even in death. As the train from Gorky

arrives in Moscow, onlookers wave red flags and hold aloft banners. Lenin is dead, one

of them reads, but his work lives on. On the 27th, the day of the funeral, it's minus

33 degrees centigrade. In the corners of Red Square soldiers build great log fires. At

4pm Lenin's coffin arrives at a wooden mausoleum that has been constructed by the Kremlin's

East Wall. The moment is soundtrack by an extraordinary symphony. On cue, machinery

and the city's factories drowns into life, alarms and sirens wail, steam locomotives blow

their whistles and weapons are fired in staccato salvos. The industrial and military mood

music of Lenin's Soviet Union. So intense is the public outpour that the new Soviet bigwigs

are inspired to devise a plan. They will embalm and preserve Lenin's corpse. It's not

what his family wants, but in the battle for Lenin's soul, the new leadership is already

a step ahead. They've set up a commission of immortalization. And so Lenin remains

on public display in Red Square right through to the present day, in fact. Over the decades

millions of courted glimpse of the man who created the world's first communist state.

For almost a century, he's been the specter at the feast of Russian history. A silent

witness to the rise of Stalin, to the horrors of another world war, through the Cold War,

...